Local human impacts interact with geography to drive benthic community depth zonation on contemporary coral reefs #ProcB - find out more from authors in our blog - royalsociety.org/blog/2025/06...

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@sosbangor.bsky.social @royalsociety.org #ProcB

Local human impacts interact with geography to drive benthic community depth zonation on contemporary coral reefs | Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences Changes in biophysical conditions and energetic resource supply across depths are predicted to promote or limit the abundance of different coral reef benthic groups. However, the degree to which regional differences in biophysical processes govern and ...

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“Local human impacts interact with geography to drive benthic community depth zonation on contemporary coral reefs”

@richardson-le.bsky.social
@remotereefs.bsky.social

💥🚶‍♀️We also found evidence of human-disrupted changes to benthic community depth zonation; patterns were inversed across depths and less distinct at populated compared to unpopulated islands within two ecoregions.

💥🌍At the three ecoregions where depth zonation existed, there was no universal ‘natural’ zonation pattern and the benthic groups most responsible for driving patterns of depth zonation differed across geographies.

💥🌊We found across our Pacific Ocean study system, depth zonation did not always occur at the taxonomic resolution of our data (broad benthic groups). In fact, we only saw evidence of depth zonation at 3/6 ecoregions.

New paper 📢 Coral reef depth zonation patterns are not 'universal' and may be disrupted by local human impacts.

We show evidence of spatially dependent effects of depth on benthic community structure across the Pacific Ocean.

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